


Less Than Friendly, More Than Reliable

by asterCrash



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-27
Updated: 2017-01-27
Packaged: 2018-09-20 04:39:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9476057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asterCrash/pseuds/asterCrash
Summary: Symmetra didn't feel the need to prove herself to Lucio, but she did anyway.Lucio didn't need to be grateful, but he was.





	

“What do you think you’re doing, Satya?”

“What needs to be done, Sanjay.”

The third and final lock cracks under the beam of the photon projector and the drawer it once held back springs open before you. You recognise your own designs first, then the subsequent modifications and notes printed on top. There are some things they were careful not to change, little hints that they never truly understood what you had made or how you had made it, but the goal was the clear and to that end understanding was not required. They intended to turn your work into a weapon.

“You’ve spent too long outside the company, Satya. I should have known better than to approve your leave.” You ignore the voice in your headset, when Sanjay is not being cryptic he is monologuing and you will have plenty of time for what needs to be done. “Wasting your time with those terrorists has poisoned your mind, they have turned you against what you believed in.” You sketch out the design for a teleporter with a practiced wave of your hands and the light before you begins to shimmer and crystalise on the floor. While you are waiting for it to finish activating you quickly place some turrets along the entrance of the room, commands to stun anyone entering without your explicit approval. The overrides to allow targeting of Vishkar staff fall clumsily from your hands, unfamiliar, unprepared. “You have become unbalanced, Satya. I had hoped for so much more from you.”

You turn back to study the designs. You had been the first architech to observe the flow-on crystalisation state, been the first to theorise about its potential uses. It seems, from the frantic notes and confused calculations, that you have also been the only Vishkar employee to date to have understood the mechanisms by which it could occur. The results, however, were simple enough to understand. A photon bomb, capable of levelling a city, without any of the fallout of a nuclear weapon. The scalable photon resonance would dissipate within a matter of days, and then a freshly cleared area could be rebuilt, a new Vishkar city of light to fill the crater. You had reported it as a scientific curiosity and assumed the matter was closed, fit only for future study, nothing further. The designs before you indicate otherwise.

“I don’t want to have to stop you, Satya. You’ve been so good to the company, you’ve paved the way for so many better tomorrows.” He refers to your clandestine work as Symmetra, of course. He never compliments you on the towering edifices to human ambition you have woven from the ethereal threads of light all around you. He only compliments you on the destruction you’ve helped wreak in the names of Vishkar. You remember how powerful his words once made you feel. How gladly you took up the costume he prepared for you, how you thrilled at the scandalous nature of it all. You prided yourself on serving the company, preparing the world for a better future and only killing when you thought you had no other choice. You had been a fool.

The teleporter finishes opening and the musician bursts through. You resist your usual urge to sneer at his antics, the loose hang of his clothes, the scuffed paint job on his stolen equipment. Stolen Vishkar equipment. You resist the urge because you are starting to believe he may be right.

“Symmetra, we good to go?” He asks you, almost placing a hand on your shoulder before reconsidering at the last second.

“I need time to destroy these hard copies.” You explain, with a flourish towards your neatly hand-sketched designs and the few models you yourself had built. “I wanted you to see.”

He looks over your shoulder at your designs, squinting as he tries to read your writing, trying to understand. You elbow him away from the designs and pull up your photon projector. “Don’t be ridiculous, you have as much hope of understanding these as you have of getting me to buy your album.”

“Satya you need to think about what you’re doing,” Sanjay is still speaking in your ear, trying to distract you. You wish you could mute him.

“I am showing you,” you explain to the musician, “because I want you to know that whatever our differences, I am not the murderer you make me out to be. My work is for a better future for all.” You activate the projector and your work goes up in flames. The insight into hard light technology may be rediscovered in the future, it may even be weaponised yet, but it will not be by your hand, and it will not be with your work. The projector’s beam increases, widening to consume the drawer as a whole, and the wall it is built into. All is reduced to so much melted steel and ash.

“Well I suppose you’ve made your decision then,” Sanjay’s comms display abruptly cuts out, a second before your entire display goes blank.

“No,” you whisper to yourself. The photon projector’s beam trickles down to nothing, though you know its charge is anything but depleted. You catch it sparking in time to throw it across the room, seconds from self-destruction. On instinct, you flex your hands to raise your shields, but the hard light projections do not materialise on command.

Lúcio catches what’s gone wrong before you do, grabbing you in a tight hug and spinning you around on the spot. Whatever debris sprayed out from the detonation of your projector must catch him in the back, you feel his grunt of pain as a hot gust of air on your neck. You don’t get time to berate him for grabbing you without your permission, as his pirouette has placed you facing your own turrets, watching as their lights slowly change from a dormant blue to an active red. You grab your teammate and pull him to cover a moment before concentrated light rakes the area you were just occupying. With subdued horror, you watch your teleporter begin to reconfigure itself, first disconnecting from a nearby Overwatch safehouse and then preparing to access a new gate entirely.

Your teleporter is about to fill the room with hostile Vishkar troops, who will rightly identify you as a terrorist and eliminate you on sight. Your photon projector is shrapnel and your shields are gone. Your own turrets are covering the only exit from this room, waiting to burn you alive the second you poke your head out of cover.

It is at this point that Sanjay disables your arm.

________________________________________

“Do not struggle, Satya, today is the most important day of your life.”

The restraints holding you down are hard plastic, and they rub the skin of your right arm raw as you pull against them. Your throat is hoarse from screaming, your face sticky with tears. Two nurses hold you in place, pinning you to the operating table with your arms spread out to either side.

“Stop acting like a child, Satya,” the doctor stabs a needle into your arm and your vision begins to swim. From across the room, something terrifying whirrs to life. “You’re ten years old, for god’s sake. Grow up.”

________________________________________

You feel numb with pain all down the right hand side of your body. Your arm dangles uselessly at your side, the blue light of its power fading. You fight against panic, rising up within you like a fountain of light. You want to scream. Half your brain feels like it’s not even there any more, though a disconnected part of you knows that is the panic more than the loss of sensation. You stare at your hand, struck dumb with the monumental transgression of what’s been done to you and only then do you notice sticky blood covering your palm.

Lúcio grunts once more and slumps against the wall you’ve both been using for cover. You can’t read his facial expressions, but sweat is soaking his top. He needs more medical assistance than his stolen Vishkar tech can give him. He looks at you, but doesn’t say anything. You can’t tell what he wants. You avert your gaze, choosing to stare down at the floor, at the broken pieces of your weapon lying around you. At their glinting mirrored interiors. Huh.

The situation couldn’t be more dire, your teleport lights up red as it connects to the local Vishkar hub and the first security guard steps through. You’re already outnumbered, outgunned and in hostile territory. Your only ally is incapacitated and the closest thing you have to a weapon is a curved piece of reflective metal.

_Looks like this situation requires a hero,_ you think to yourself.

You stand up from being your cover with a flourish of your wrist, shrapnel in hand. It’s hardly the smooth flowing dance you prefer with one arm hanging limp from your side, but it distracts the security guards all the same. For a precious second they’re not sure how to react. That second allows your turrets to hone in on your position and fire. Sanjay made a mistake thinking he could use your own weapons against you, the designs of those turrets might as well be printed on the backs of your eyelids. You know they always aim for the centre of mass, you know exactly where to hold your mirror between yourself and the incoming beams. Sanjay only sent five guards to apprehend you, yet another mistake. The last of them was the first to raise his weapon to the ready, and it’s his eyes you target first. He pulls his trigger as the light burns his retina and two of his fellow guards fly into a nearby wall with a pair of sickening crunches.

Your mirror begins to burn in your hand, a planned toss has it flying towards your turrets. Targeting protocol has them follow an established light source and the beams track across the room to follow the projectile. One sweeps wide across the guards, raking them with burning light before all beams converge at the apex of your throw, their crossfire completely destroying the array you had set up.

Success this far thrills you, floods you with adrenaline. You don’t even flinch when the first shot goes clean through your arm. Sanjay was right to send at least one man with a conventional gun, but he was a fool not to tell that man to aim for your heart. You hear the metal and plastic that was once your right arm clatter to the ground behind you, but you don’t stop your charge forward. The guard with the gun panics of course, and tries to fire again, you don’t see any exit wound as his wayward bullet enters the shoulder of the guard in front of him. He doesn’t get a third shot off before you send the wounded guard stumbling backwards into him with a punch to the sternum. The two stagger, and fortune smiles on you as they stagger together back towards the teleporter pad. You don’t let up on your attack, pushing them, keeping them from raising their weapons to you. With a mighty kick you send the pair tripping backwards into the gateway of light. Then, as they fall half-in and half-out of the doorway you stamp your foot down on the manual disconnect switch.

The static discharge carries you off your feet, and as the ground meets your back and knocks the wind out of you, you shout in triumph. Five men, three turrets and a teleporter in ten seconds with a piece of scrap. You wish you had video footage.

________________________________________

By the time guards arrive through the front door, you and Lúcio have long absconded through the restored teleporter gate. You wish you could have seen the look on Sanjay’s face when he saw the present the Australians left waiting for them.

________________________________________

Lúcio is well liked around the base. He is friends with everyone. When they smile, he smiles back without hesitating. He can joke with the Australians, play games with the Korean, even the old soldiers like him as well as they like anyone.

Suffice to say, bringing him back gravely wounded did not do you any favours with the other Overwatch members. It didn’t matter that he likely saved your life, or that you saved his in return. It wouldn’t help if you said sorry. It never helps when you say sorry.

You keep to your room, not knowing what to do without your arm. Ziegler won’t declare you fit to leave the base, and even if she did there’s nowhere for you to go. You can’t join the others on missions without your Vishkar equipment and you have nowhere else to go. As it is, that they are allowing you space at the Watchpoint at all is a grace you likely do not deserve in the eyes of many.

Trying to dance with one less arm is odd. It occurs to you that you’d never been given a chance to live without your arm after your coming of age. You have to learn the most basic tasks from scratch, eating, reading, washing yourself. Even that is a pittance of effort compared to learning to live without having the purity of light to shape your thoughts, to toy with, to build, to create. You feel like half your mind is missing, and half your heart with it.

You have visitors, though you never know what to say to them. The Egyptians, both old and young, visit to ensure you’re coping. The younger assures you what you did was the right thing, but you’re not as sure as you were before. The older assures you that you’ll learn to live without, and then you’ll learn to thrive. You bite your tongue rather than reply to her, rather than telling her you’d claw out both eyes if it meant getting to feel the prickle of hard light in your hands again.

The days pass and you do nothing but beat your head against a wall, sometimes literally. There is nothing left to you that you love more than your work, and for your morals you are now forever kept from it. You begin to question whether you had ever been doing the right thing. Was building cities in the interests of a better world if they were cities run by Vishkar? Could you trust any of your happy memories or were they too laden with failures you’d never noticed? How much of your life had people been lying to you? You have no answers.

A visitor comes one day, unexpected, and you are surprised to find it is the musician, bandages removed, walking with a slight wince to his step but otherwise healthy. You envy his recovery, though guilt quashes that feeling quickly.

“Hey,” he says, infuriatingly casual, “I heard you weren’t doing too good.”

“I am fine.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” he says, digging his hands into his pockets and turning away from you to examine your quarters. It is not what you are used to, but you have tried to make the space as ordered as possible. “Listen I,” he hesitates, doesn’t know where to start. You try, almost painfully, to read his expression, but it remains beyond you.

“Vishkar,” he says, “it takes and takes and takes and takes,” a familiar refrain. “I,” hesitating again, “I thought,” he runs out of words to say, frowning. If it’s another lecture he’s here to give, you’re ready to ask him to leave. You don’t have time for his proselytizing, even when time is all you have left.

“Here,” he says, pulling something from his pocket, a small disc of blue crystalline glass. “Its, it’s a gift.”

You accept the glass in your remaining hand, examining its faceted surface, the white gold base it’s set into. The delicate interplay of almost invisible circuitry behind it.

“We all worked really hard on getting it for you, so uh…” he trails off, but it’s almost beyond your notice.

This is a prototype, you’re certain. No company markings, but Vishkar all over. A hard light projector. A constructor.

“Are you going to...?”

You activate it and the constructor whirs to life in the palm of your hand tiny beams of light crystallising in the air above it, bit by bit sketching themselves into reality, a pattern growing more and more intricate through the second. A familiar pattern.

“Woah,” Lucio says in front of you.

First the fingers begin to take shape, full human articulation, sensate, dextrous. As each knuckle joint hardens you see them click together, bending just a little bit into their natural position. Next, the palm begins to form, even before the fingers are finished, a smooth dish with a circular indent in the centre. The wrist, the forearm, the elbow, it all forms from light itself. You feel tears streaking down your cheeks, but you don’t move to intercept them. Lucio doesn’t say anything.

When at last it has finished making your new arm, you set the constructor down on the floor, and take the limp metal and glass from its gentle anti-grav beam. It clicks perfectly into your shoulder socket, and within moments you feel sensation lighting up, a fire in your brain as you remember all that you are and all that you are capable of. You form a fist, just to prove to yourself that you can, and picking up the constructor from the floor, you set it into place in the centre of your palm.

The first thing you call up, using the parts of your mind you thought had gone to sleep forever, is a simple geometric pattern. The lines flex and rotate as you spin it around in the palm of your hand, shaping your destiny, shaping your newfound freedom.

Lucio clears his throat, and you remember suddenly that you’re not alone.

“Oh, I,” words fail you, moreso than usual, so you do the only thing you can think to do and embrace him. You hold him tight with both arms, as he laughs and holds you back.

“Thank you.”

**Author's Note:**

> A bit rushed, wanted this out of my work in progress folder.


End file.
